London’s Mega-Mosque Blocked For Now

by James Delingpole

01/26/2010

Islamists’ plans to build one of the largest mosques in Europe within a stone’s throw of the site of the 2012 London Olympic Games hit a bureaucratic snag when the planners failed to meet a deadline. Right now -- thankfully -- the 12,000 capacity mosque can’t be built.

The proposed London "Mega-Mosque" wouldn't just have stuck out like a sore thumb. It would have stuck out like a defiant, upraised middle finger sending a very clear signal from the world of militant, conquering Islam to Western civilization. "Hasta la vista, baby!" It would have said. " Welcome to the Caliphate!"

Which is why one or two of us here in Britain, right now, are sighing a rather huge sigh of relief at the news that the Mega-Mosque is no more. At least we hope it is. There's always the grim possibility that -- as it did after its first rumored death a year and a half ago -- that the Mega Mosque may yet try to stage a Terminator-style comeback.

But the auguries so far are promising: the 12,000-seater (or should that be
12,000-prayer-matter?) mosque, which was supposed to have been built in East
London in time for London's 2012 Olympic Games, has been denied planning
permission by the local borough council. This means that with luck, the
Mega-Mosque will never be built -- especially if the council goes ahead with its
plans to impose a compulsory purchase order on the land so as to stop its
current owner Tabligli Jamaat from developing it.

Why would the Mega Mosque have been such a disaster not just for London, Europe, and the whole of the Western world? A number of reasons, perhaps the most worrying one being its symbolic impact.

Had the Mega-Mosque gone ahead, it would have been erected on a site perilously close to that of the London Olympic stadium. Not only would Olympics fans have had to walk past it when going from the tube station to the stadium, but in every aerial shot of the event, it would have been London's most visible religious building -- far more, so, than, say St. Paul's Cathedral, or that 1000-year old irrelevance Westminster Abbey. Its effect on U.S. viewers, no doubt, would have been especially marked. "Just as we thought," many of you reading this would have gone: "Europe is now Eurabia."

the rest at Human Events